My profile picture on here commemorates Ba Jin, the leading anarchist Chinese writer. His short stories and novels animated a revolutionary generation that saw China break from thousands of years of dynastic rule - but he was personally punished by Mao during the Cultural Revolution. His wife was denied treatment for her cancer and she would die. Ba Jin took to writing about remembering the Cultural Revolution and reading Dante's Inferno to gain some small measure of comfort.

Some people talk about the "Chinese model" as if it is a matter of destiny, but the recent ideological fascination with Marx and a stronger Leninist state doesn't have as strong of a root as most assume, and even less so the idea of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" forged right after Ba Jin's torment. Ba Jin's story tells us that there was always a China that looked to temper the state's excesses and one rooted in a desire to engage the world (at the time in Esperanto, perhaps now with Bitcoin). Though the Chinese Communist Party has tried to seize his legacy, I believe it is Chinese cypherpunks looking to hedge and move away from one of the most unequal fiat kingdoms on Earth (China's income inequality by some measures surpasses that of the United States) that truly follow Ba Jin's legacy.

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